The night before the birth of my second child, the obstetrician on ward duty stopped at the foot of my bed, and after surveying my case notes for a moment, said in what I assume was supposed to be a sympathetic manner: "Not many people realise that giving birth is still one of the most dangerous things a woman can do." Not exactly tactful, I thought, but I let it pass. Two weeks previously, I'd been hospitalised with pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy-related condition that can be fatal, so his remark was to some extent justified.
My son Solomon was born at four o'clock the next day. An easy delivery. A healthy baby boy. Within minutes of the birth, however, things started to go wrong. Something to do with the placenta, not the pre-eclampsia. She's haemorrhaging, someone said. Someone else took the baby away and handed him to my husband. The tranquil, dimly lit delivery room of a moment before was deluged with medical staff and glaring lights. A consent form was pushed in front of me. My fingers were folded around a pen. I had no idea what I was consenting to, could barely hold the pen. Some time later I regained consciousness. A large blood transfusion was feeding into one arm, a hefty dose of antibiotics into the other. You're out of danger, everyone congratulated me. Thank heavens for modern medicine!
Looking back on my son's birth, frightening as it was, it nevertheless seems like a thinly worked prologue to the complex drama that came next. Giving birth is dangerous, without a doubt, but the dangers that accompany motherhood come in many forms, I would learn, and physical danger was by no means the only one to fear.
The following day, my husband brought our two-and-a-half year old daughter, Jessie, into hospital to meet her new brother. How many picture books had we read to her to prepare for this moment? How much thought had we given to how to make this first encounter a joyful and positive one for her? And yet, for all our careful preparations, no fraction of anxiety had been given to what actually happened.
The little girl who walked through the door, nervously holding her father's hand; who scrambled up on to the hospital bed and threw herself on top of me in a wholehearted embrace, was not the child I'd said goodbye to two days before. A bizarre metamorphosis had occurred. She looked huge, suddenly. No longer a little girl at all. Compared to the baby's delicate limbs, her toddler hands and feet seemed enormous. Compared to his newborn fragility, her chunky vitality seemed almost menacing. In the space of just 48 hours my eye had become, shockingly, unaccustomed to her.
A week later, I was discharged from hospital and went home to a new life as the mother of two children. Already drained by a difficult pregnancy and labour, I was wholly unprepared for the emotional rollercoaster that lay ahead, caring - or trying to care - for a tetchy baby and a demanding toddler. I became the kind of mother I never dreamed I'd be, the kind of mother who coos at her baby, then in the next breath snaps at her bewildered toddler.
The next few months were a nightmare - bad for me, infinitely worse for my daughter, a hideous waking dream that never ended. I'd worried about whether I would be able to love the baby; the truth was that in those early days with two children, it was not the baby, but my daughter I had difficulty loving.
Baffled by my coldness, she clung, played up, acted out; in short, did whatever she could to try to recover our previous closeness. She commandeered the freshly washed babygrows for her teddies, climbed into the Moses basket in her muddy wellies; when I sat down to breastfeed, she'd clamber on to my shoulders; when I finally got the baby off to sleep, she'd thrust her face into his and wake him up again. Her increasingly extravagant efforts to reclaim my attention inevitably had the opposite effect.
I was scarcely less distressed than she was by the abrupt change in our relationship. It was like walking into a favourite room to find everything has been rearranged: the furniture, the pictures, the objects inside the cupboards and drawers, the knick-knacks on the shelves, the cushions on the sofa, the books on the table. However hard I tried, I could not get my bearings. Nothing was where I expected it or how I wanted it. I wandered through this skewed landscape in a state of agonised disorientation, lost and mapless.
When I looked at my little girl, I felt none of the things I wanted to feel. When she turned to me, it was like being confronted by a stranger. Only late at night, when I'd tiptoe into her room to kiss her goodnight and pause to look down at her sleeping face, would I feel something of the steady tenderness of before. Even now, 12 years on, it hardly bears thinking about what that time must have been like for her.
Was it shame at my failure to love her properly that made me so determined to hide the fact from everybody else? I could have won an Oscar for the performance I put on for the health visitor. Depressed? Certainly not. Coping OK? Absolutely fine. I told no one, neither friends, nor family. I didn't even confide in my husband. What could I have said? He would have been appalled. And his would have been the natural reaction. I, surely, was the unnatural one.
Guilt-racked, addled from a lack of sleep, awash with hormones, I had few reserves to think about, let alone deal with what was happening. What little energy I possessed for the practical and emotional tasks of mothering were directed wholly towards the baby. Not because I wanted it that way, just because it was that way.
An evolutionary imperative that preferenced the most vulnerable child? A form of postnatal depression? A flaw in my mothering capacity? All of the above? But perhaps larger influences were also at work. According to the psychologist Penny Munn, mothering in western culture is "based on ideas of romantic love that assume a good mother will replicate a nurturing, romantic relationship with each successive child".
I shouldn't have googled!
I don't want my feelings for my DD to change!!!! Is this a common experience??
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.... however I must say that I too, have been thinking ALOT, every day.... about how #2 will come into our family and how it will change things... I get really nervous thinking about it and sometimes feel a bit panicky because DD has grown up so fast already I just want to enjoy her while she's so little with no other distractions!! Yet at the same time, DH and I very much so want to give her a little brother or sister to play with!! She just LOVES kids.... she is drawn to them.... 
I had depression etc. So this time I have been a lot happier. At the end of the day though I love them all so much!
oh man ......... so shouldn't have read that, now I am worrying about TTC #2 
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